We are pleased to announce that Repbase, GIRI's foundational reference collection of eukaryotic transposable element consensus sequences, will be released under a CC0 public domain license as part of a broader effort to unify Repbase and Dfam into a fully open foundation for transposable element research.

This transition reflects the mission that has guided the Genetic Information Research Institute since its founding by Dr. Jerzy Jurka in 1994: to pursue and promote original, peer-reviewed research on mobile DNA, repetitive elements, and transposable elements, and to disseminate the databases and software that make that research useful to the scientific community. Over more than three decades, Repbase has grown through the combination of computational methods and expert human curation. That work has helped support eukaryotic genome annotation and repeat masking, comparative and evolutionary genomics, and studies of how transposable elements shape genome structure, regulation, and function.

This next chapter is being built in partnership with the Dfam team, including Travis Wheeler at the University of Arizona and Arian Smit and Robert Hubley at the Institute for Systems Biology, whose collective work on open, scalable transposable element resources has made Dfam an essential platform for the field. By combining Repbase’s depth of expert curation with Dfam’s open infrastructure, this collaboration will give the research community the benefit of both resources in a unified, unrestricted framework.

By making Repbase openly available under CC0 and partnering with Dfam, GIRI is taking the next step in its mission: ensuring that this accumulated knowledge can be used, shared, and built upon without restriction. We are grateful to the scientists who brought Repbase to this point, including Kenji Kojima, Weidong Bao, Oleksiy Kohany, Vladimir Kapitonov, Noriko Kojima, Arian Smit, and contributors across the field.

Current Repbase subscribers will continue to be supported through the girinst.org website, which will remain the primary point of contact for subscriber support, access questions, and transition updates.